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This is an archive of past discussions about Chess. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
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Steinitz did not claim to be champ until after Morphy was dead, when he declared that the match with Zuckertort was for the world championship. Despite the fact that Morphy refused to play, until his death he was still considered the greatest living player, and no one would have taken Steinitz's claim seriously. Moreover, Steinitz's tournament and match record was not stellar in the 1860's; he was simply one of many strong masters. ChessPlayer
Removed from main page: Theoretically, at some point in the future, a computer will be able to play all possible chess games and determine the optimal move for any given board position (using Moore's Law as a guide, it probably won't happen until 2030). For example, the fastest chess programs can 'look ahead' and completely finish the last 15 moves in a game (because of "pre-calculated" endgame tables). This is possible because there is a finite number of ways the chess pieces can be arranged on the chessboard.
I have seen estimates for the number of particles in the observable universe ranging from 1080 to 1088 or so. Have there been recent changes in those estimates? --AxelBoldt
The table in Chess/Board is plagued by the same problem as described in talk:Hebrew_alphabet. The HTML code is crashing some browser. I beleive the indentation of the table code is causing Wikipedia to insert a PRE tag and /PRE tag around the entries. It may or may not be the cause of the crash though.
If you can be more specific, we can diagnose this. Particularly, if it consistently crashes when you use a specific browser, please tell us exactly what that is here; we'll then edit the page, and you can try again with that same browser. But if you just talk in generalities we can't help. --LDC
Now the center of the boards is white on Netscape. On IE, it looks fine.
It's not the browser, it's your fonts. Even some of the largest Unicode fonts available (such as MS Arial Unicode) do not have _all_ characters, such as the chess pieces. Some fonts might have the chess pieces but not the Chinese characters. The browser does a pretty good job finding a font with the right characters when needed, but you do have to have the fonts installed. --LDC
Does anyone want to tackle chinese chess? I know the bare bones of the game (how the peices move and their english names), but little else. It's a very tactical game that I enjoy greatly when I have the chance to play it. --BlackGriffen
Comments that I've just placed at Talk:Unicode I am not a techie! Nevertheless I can see the usefulness of much of the material available in Unicode. Neither am I the sort of anti-techie that complains that anything in other than plain-Jane unaccented English alphabetical characters must be thrown out of Wikipedia, or that articles should not be displaying meaningless question marks. I was visiting the chess page, and someone there has made a valiant effort to produce diagrams of how the pieces move by using only ordinary keyboard characters. I'm sure that he would not take it as a sign of disrespect when I say that it looks like shit.
I'm sure that most of us would like to see the special symbols, letters, or chinese characters at the appropriate time and place. At the same time I understand that for many Wikipedians there are technical reasons which prevent their hardware from dealing with this material (eg. limited memory). Then there are others for whom only the appropriate software is missing. Even some of the people with hardware restrictions may be able to handle Greek or Russian, though probably not Chinese. In cases where I've tried to find the code, I've ended up wading through reams of technical discussions. These discussions may be very interesting, but they don't provide a solution to my immediate problem.
The practical suggestion may be a notice at the head of any article containing symbols not in ISO 8859-1 saying in effect. "This article contains non-standard characters. You may download these characters by activating this LINK"
Eclecticology
Isn't gnuchess is vastly weaker than other widely distributed software? Fritz or Rebel could defeat most master players under tournament conditions, but I am not sure gnuchess could. Can anyone confirm or contradict? Thanks. --Karl Juhnke
From the main article: "Minor variations to the rules would either make chess a trivially easy task for a computer to win, or conversely leave even elaborate computers easy pickings for amateur players." Really? What minor variations? Does anyone have a citation for this? -- The Anome
I, too, am curious what "minor variations" you have in mind. For example, I understand that it doesn't particularly tip the balance of power between computers and humans to play FischeRandom chess, or chess at material odds. The variations at which computers are known to stink relative to humans all seem to me to involve major rule changes, e.g. bughouse.
The reason computers excel at some games and do poorly at others depends, AFAIK, mostly on the presence/absence of a quick, reliable static evaluation function. In chess you get a very fast and reasonably accurate static evaluation simply by counting up material. Similarly for pruning heuristics, the most important thing is to keep examining a position as long as there are captures, checks, or promotions. Otherwise the static evaluation is OK.
In the absence of any specific examples of how a small change in rules makes a big change in computer playing strength relative to human playing strength, isn't the contested sentence purely speculative? --Karl Juhnke
Nice edit, Axel, issue resolved. Does that mean we should delete the talk section about it? --Karl Juhnke
No, we usually junk talk entries only if the discussion refers to a completely different version than the current one. AxelBoldt
If fifty moves have been played by each player without a piece being taken or a pawn moved (in tournament play, some situations are extended to one hundred moves).
I´m quite confident that this was abandond a few years ago. --Vulture
Back when I was an active USCF player, there was an addendum to the 50-move rule published by the USCF explicitly laying out one specific set of conditions under which 100 moves would be allowed: it was for certain Knight-vs-Pawn endings, laid out in great detail in the addendum. I still have it in my paper copy of the rulebook. If Vaulture says it was abandoned, and you can't find it in the present rules, I have no doubt that it was in fact abandoned. I was not able to find any information about exactly when that happened, or why. --Lee Daniel Crocker
What Lee has been doing with the diagrams makes the article(s) on chess look great! Is there a technique available for creating these drawings to illustrate other articles about chess? Eclecticology
I created the diagrams with "xboard" and "Gimp". If you'd like some diagrams for specific things, let me know. The piece movements were already in separate articles. I think they might be better in a single "Rules of chess" article as well, but that would be a lot more work chasing down old links. Maybe after I get the text itself up to shape we can look at a reorganization. --LDC
Can we hunt down any software which can produce a png out of a position description? I would really like to add some boards to Chess Strategy and Tactics. AxelBoldt
I imagine xboard and gimp might be hacked and scripted to do that, but I'm not sure whether that would get enough use to be worth the effort, or if there might already be something out there. Xboard will read and write game positions in text files. --LDC
If you have gifs of the pieces, here's a cgi script which can create a board on the fly: http://shawn.apocabilly.org/pwg/examples/4ex.html.
There's also a chess style and fonts for LaTeX.
The CGI used Perl's "GD" module, which only creates GIFs, I think. I might also be able to hack something quickly that uses ESR's "sng". --LDC
A simple VB .Net application can be written to generate PNG (or any other format) chess board images with GUI options for image format, grid numbering, colors and size. If anyone thinks that such an application would be helpful, let me know. The .Net framework would need to be installed on systems in order to run the program though. Robert Lee 13:02 Nov 1, 2002 (UTC)
What I find difficult to accept is why the rules about the movement of the pieces are now in separate articles. If you look at this from the point of view of the potential user he is more likely to want to print out the information to have available beside the chessboard. It is unlikely that he will want to click on a different link for each piece. Eclecticology
I agree that many users will want the rules all in one place. On the other hand, there will also be some users (albeit fewer) who are not interested in playing chess but still want information about an individual piece. For example, I might be writing a poem in which I am playing on the various meanings of knight/night, and want a quick reference on the moves, history, strategic importance, etc. of the chess knight. As the mass of chess material on Wikipedia grows, it seems both advisable and inevitable to have a separate article about each piece.
My question is how much repetition to countenance. My programmer's instinct is say "as close to zero as possible", i.e. do it right in one place and then link from everywhere else. But it would definitely disrupt the flow of Axel's strategy article if the blurb about bishops were moved to the bishop article and linked. Similarly, it will break the flow of reading about a tactics article to link to separate pages on fork, pin, skewer, discovered attack, overloading, undermining, interference, underpromotion, zwischenzug, ablenkung, hinlenkung, etc.
Is it possible to put links inside a page, as in HTML? For example, there wouldn't need to be a separate article for forking if one could link directly to the section of the tactics article which deals with forks. That would allow for both readable articles and precise linking. --Karl Juhnke
A bold black adventurous Knight
Climbed Rooks for the white Queen's delight
Not high Bishop's roar
Nor Pawns at the door
Could save the poor King from this fright.
Your reference to poetry made my descent into doggerel inevitable.
In my view an encyclopedia attempts a balance between long tedious articles one one hand and fragmentation on the other. With specific reference to chess, I consider this long string of separate articles to be fragmentation. May I therefore suggest the following possible organizational outline for this topic
I've moved my subject outline for chess to the main page, and I'm working through the 133 items that "Search" gave me, with a view to making sure that they are all appropriately co-ordinated.
Eclecticology
No objection to reorganizing the talk. Indeed, I'd be happier if some of the musty comments were simply deleted. The most current comments are presently hardest to find.
On that note, I'm unclear exactly what your outline is suggesting. Are you proposing one article per bullet, or merely one article per top-level bullet, or a single, long, well-organized article? In the balance between fragmentation and tedium, my hunch is that an on-line encyclopedia can afford more fragmentation than a paper encyclopedia, due to the convenience of hyperlinks, although I don't by any means want to deprecate the value of a coherent, contiguous read. --Karl Juhnke
For the record, the main reason I broke chess variants off from the main article is because it's such a rich field (there's so many variants and I plan to write about a lot of them!) and well, variants aren't chess! Also, I think the best thing to do is break all of them off with articles. Leave one paragraph about each of them and a link to follow another article for more detail. That way we'll have more content about Chess! Once an article gets long enough, it's not so inviting to edit anymore... --Chuck Smith
In the section "Rules", the png of the original position overlaps with the "1." from the first rule. This is on IE 6.0. AxelBoldt
I don't think either Garry Kasparov or Vishwanathan Anand, both Asians of course, would agree that Go and Shogi were preeminent in their countries.
I would change Asian to Oriental, but I get the impression that that's considered pejorative currently in the US. Does anyone have a better term?
I think "East Asia" fits better; Go is played in Korea and China, and chinese chess is played in China as well. Hopefully, India doesn't count as East Asia, since they don't play Go or Shogi there. AxelBoldt
Right, East Asia, and eliminate Shogi. It is popular only in Japan, and even in Japan doesn't have the status of go.
Doesn't Deep Blue deserve a mention in the main text?
...Only if Deep Fritz gets more of a mention.
Hey uh like if someone could figure out how a user could start from the beginning and enter a move-and so on-we could set up some sweet opening book tables-but we'd need either a page for each move or some kinda java program or whatnot
Lir 16:15 Oct 6, 2002 (UTC)
Absolutely. We should go as deep as we can. We should do chess here just like we do normal entries. We should branch and branch and branch and keep going. We should make it a goal to have chess solved on this site. There are two ways to do this. The first method is somewhat wasteful because it involves making a LOT of html pages-the second method is very easy. It just takes somebody taking the time to write a simple program that itnerfaces with wikipedia.
I dont plan to write any program. I don't do compsci.
I agree with a point made earlier: we should have one page which summarizes the rules of chess, self-contained and ready for printing. The current fragmentation is bad. Repetition of material is no big problem. If the page about the bishop repeats information from the rules page and from the strategy and tactics page, that's ok. AxelBoldt 19:54 Oct 6, 2002 (UTC)
Is there anything like a chess wiki? This could be added to the article (discussion to improve the article, but I wouldn´t ask if I wasn´t curious myself :) )
Is there a convention for capitalization of first letter of piece names? In the Chess openings page upper and lower case are mixed. In the end game page I've made them consistently lower case (I think this is easier to read).
I want to know if I can create a page called "chess terminology" and explain some of the chess jargon. Would this make it too much like a dictionary? It is distracting to define all the new terms (like rank and file and minor piece). I'd like someone's opinion because I'm a wikinewbie. Arvindn
This paragraph seems misleading:
- These changes collectively helped popularize chess by making the action faster-paced. The game in Europe since that time has been almost the same as is played today. The current rules were completely finalized in the early 19th century.
According to Murray chess was more popular in Medieval Europe than it is today. The modern game developed a more devoted following and was open to deeper analysis. --Jeff 17:10 Jan 14, 2003 (UTC)
Why was the link to fairy chess removed? -- SGB 2003-03-01
I spent a few hours last night reseaching and composing a page on "fairy chess" only to find that it is synonymous with "fantasy chess variants". As such, fairy chess is not parallel with Baroque Chess, Atomic Chess, and Fischer Random Chess (which are examples of the class) and does not belong in the bulleted list. Rather than create a new page for a synonym for an existing page, I added descriptions of fairy chess to chess variant and chess puzzles. I can't find a description of a unique game fairy chess. Kirkjobsluder 2003-03-01
I defer to this responsible outline of themed chess variants:
Chess Variant Pages- Themed Chess Variants
http://www.chessvariants.com/ithemed.html
Note that there are 11 categories in which "fantasy variants" is listed merely as one. "Fairy chess" is not listed as a category, though.
OmegaMan
Is there already a list somewhere of other non-English names for chess as it is for example in the article for the Earth? If not and if someone would make it - here are some terms:
Best regards. --XJamRastafire 23:11 May 9, 2003 (UTC)
The following was added recently:
I am pretty sure that this is rubbish i.e. the 'thus' does not follow from the previous line (e.g. tic-tac-toe / noughts and crosses is as 'complete-information' but that doesn't make it a win for crosses!) And I am pretty sure I would've noticed in the papers if someone had solved chess. Pcb21 15:56 26 May 2003 (UTC)
I changed the statement. It can be proved that there is a strategy by which white can either win or force a draw. It's an existence theorem and no one knows what it is. Roadrunner
I removed the following paragraph ( i.e. the paragraph that Roadrunner had just added to replace the initial bogus paragraph --pcb21):
This doesn't follow at all, as far as I can see. Do you have a reference for it? --Zundark 16:41 26 May 2003 (UTC)
The opinion at "rec.chess" is incorrect.
Even though the best chess supercomputers remain orders of magnitude away from having the processing might to solve an entire game of standard chess, its initial position is NOT zugzwang for white. In principle, a first-move-of-the-game advantage always exists for white in ALL chess-related games (to varying extents) except those which are unstable (i.e., fatally flawed in design).
It fares well for standard chess that the armies are equal and symmetrical (comparatively, at least) in their initial positions. Furthermore, the opening book and endgame studies, based upon the most effective, known human and/or computer moves and their analyses, have been so exhaustively searched and richly catalogued that most modern chess experts firmly believe if there were ANY advantage for black, it would have discovered and irrefutably, routinely used to achieve a material and/or positional advantage by some definite point in the opening game (regardless of the opening chosen and executed by white).
In expert tournament play, appr. 55% of games which do not end in a draw are victories for white. Although zugzwang for white has not yet been conclusively disproven mathematically, it is exceedingly unlikely to exist since standard chess is a stable game. Although the stability of standard chess has never been proven by mathematical means either, there are no serious design flaws present, easily detectable by experts, to trigger fundamental doubts regarding its stability.
By the way, when standard chess is someday solved by a supercomputer, it will be found to predestine either be a victory for white [most likely] or a draw but NEVER a victory for black.
OmegaMan
I understand. I guess it depends upon exactly where one judges that the line between a small yet admissible possibility and an impossibility should be drawn. Mathematics will not decide for us. For example, I am 99+% sure that Gawd does not exist. I say that makes me an atheist. My religious friend says that only makes me an agnostic.
OmegaMan
EXPTIME-complete is also consistent with my months of experience in playtesting some chess variants. Generally, it requires an average of 8-10 times as long to thoroughly search (via brute force methods) each successively deeper ply. Crossing 10-12 plies, computer playing both white & black, is not too time-consuming for a very fast computer examining most chess variants yet 15-18 plies is impossible in less than years with current technology. Unfortunately, an incisive, evenly-matched game can be expected to run 40-50 moves. This is a very extreme shortfall. Therefore, I can easily believe that we are at least one century away from being able to completely "burn thru" standard FIDE chess (i.e., calculate the game of all possible rational games). --OmegaMan
This page claims that Chatrang was the first version of chess, and that Shatranj is the same thing. This does not appear to be the case, at least given the outline on chessvariants. They state that the first version was called Chaturanga, and that Shatranj is a different version taken from it in Persia.
Removed or from earlier board games played in China. Originally used for astrological purposes, it soon became a purely militaristic game involving four major arms: soldiers, elephants, horses and chariots from the article due to its highly speculative nature. --Imran
The chess-related pages all seem to be well-written and well-researched (knowing little more than the basics of the game, I guess I cannot really judge). What I found striking though is that at the beginning of the chess article it is not mentioned what the goal is, i e who the winner is. Could you add this for the benefit of those who read this article because they don't already know the game (shouldn't be a surprise considering this is an encyclopaedia)? --KF 12:57, 2 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Just a little tidbit to add: If you put one grain of rice on the first square, 2 on the second, 4 on the next, you end up with (thanks to maple)
sum('2^(k-1)', 'k'=1..64);
That's 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 -- 18.4 quintillion grains. I'm going to add that little detail to the article :) →Raul654 07:50, Feb 10, 2004 (UTC)
I don't think the new image is any better than the previous image really, especially as this new image isn't PD/GFDL. --Imran 23:52, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)
---
Opening Moves / White - Black
White
Fantastic article on Chess, esp. the beginning about the # of possible moves, exactly what I was looking for when i entered it in :).
Perhaps the next logical step is to do the opening moves, and it is quite easy to do white:
2*8 possible pawn moves (each of the 8 being moved either 1 or 2 steps) + 2*2 possible knight moves (each knight forking left or right) = 20 possible opening moves for white.
I know many of their names, and I have a few chess webpages bookmarked as well.
Does anyone know how to tackel black's opening moves? Usually they are in response to white's move so its a little more complex. I'll draw up a list of white moves and then we can go from there. --ShaunMacPherson 05:05, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Yes. see list of chess openings -- "tackling" the moves is extremely complicated. There are no less than 500 "opening categories"; from A00 to E99. Almost nothing has been done with the list, so pick an opening and I'll happilly work on it with you. Lirath Q. Pynnor
I have just made a few changes to the chess entry and when I get done picking my jaw up off the floor I'll finish typing this... `
\ *
Okay I'm ready now.
I find it very alarming that no mention was made in the overview that each player has 16 of the pieces for his own, only that there were 32 pieces. Would communists assume each player "owns" half the pieces? Yes, nitpicking, that's what we do here, we pick nits. Also no mention is made that the pieces are differentiated (usually by color though not always) and the squares on the board are also differentiated. There are many pictures, but what about the blind? Let me know if I'm too aggressive hunting nits here. To put it bluntly, that overview sucks a$$...
Scrolling down, however, we find over one hundred links to chess history, chess literature, chess moves, chess games, chess people, chess places, chess everything and this *BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP* lousy overview.
I think the priorities of people around here are SERIOUSLY out of whack. - Plautus satire 14:54, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Any excuse will do, Raul654. (I do find it interesting that you were the first one to quibble in that intervening seven minutes. - Plautus satire 15:03, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)) - Plautus satire 15:02, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I would like to see a defense of the use of the word "luck" in this entry on chess. I feel the word "luck" has a meaning that is so arbitrary that it is useless in an encyclopedia except in the entries directly related to describing the phenomena itself. Luck is not quantifiable or really qualifiable in any objective sense, so it should not be used as an accurate qualifier or quantifier in any context where accuracy is important. - Plautus satire 15:02, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Why are there only "estimates" on the number of legal positions? Isn't this something that can be discretely calculated without any guessing? - Plautus satire 18:32, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Many moves could be eliminted very quickly, as I explained about bishops. [Virtually] Every other piece has the potential to be anywhere on the board in the future. The only pieces that can't move backward are pawns. It would seem that only pawns and bishops are a problem so far. What other positions could be illegal? - Plautus satire 20:21, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
And I just realized another exception, two kings can not be adjacent. Note that it's already been pointed out this is different than calculating legal moves. Without the precondition of explain why two players would get there pieces in a certain configuration all bets are off, it's a simple matter of "can this piece be here after the beginning of the game?" - Plautus satire 20:28, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I already explained how I'd calculate it, if, for example, I were being paid to do it. I'd calculate the legal moves, calculate the illegal moves, then through simple reverse addition (known as subtraction) I would derive the solution. - Plautus satire 20:19, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Would anybody care to explain where the big unsolvable mystery here is? The more I think about it the more I'm convinced there is a quick solution based firmly in logic and mathematics. - Plautus satire 20:30, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I hate to get metaphysical, but you leave me no choice. How is the universe able to keep track of "legal" positions on a chess board. How are people able to determine the legality of a move? How are either of these two co-related things possible unless there exists a near-instantaneous way of determination? Oh, right, I forgot, the universe processes at infinite speed...except during big bangs. - Plautus satire 20:35, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Just to end this debate, I'm willing to admit that you twothree bothall lack the ability to calculate the number of legal positions and therefore must only estimate. Time to move on, now, I've already wasted enough of my time on this and nobody is paying me to care yet. - Plautus satire 20:41, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
For anyone who is interested, I did do a bit of number crunching. For 2-32 chess pieces (the number changes as pieces are captured), the number of arrangements = sum(n! * choose (64, n), n=2..32) = .4918139231 * 10 ^ 88. →Raul654 20:47, Feb 25, 2004 (UTC)
There are more possible chess positions, then there are known atoms in the universe. Its hardly a "trivial" matter to calculate such a thing. Lirath Q. Pynnor
Hey, everybody, I just wanted to say that I'm glad to see people are interested in this issue enough to discuss it. Perhaps I took a wrong turn somewhere, but my original intent was to stimulate discussion to improve an entry I just took an interest in (due to the email list, by the way). I admit I've been pretty defensive lately, I apologize for that. Is it possible we can put our heads together and come up with a better range for the numbers there, or is that really the absolute best we can get? I hope we can do better, but if not I will accept we are not superhuman. - Plautus satire 01:31, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I believe I read 1080 somewhere. 64.232.242.237
Does anybody have a hard number with a source that they want to put in the article? If not, I don't see any point in arguing about this. --Camembert
Even at chess tournaments, where I've seen this discussed, nobody really had an idea how many positions were possible. Suffice it to say, there are a lot of possible positions. There does seem to be general agreeement, around the internet and in books, that there are more possible chess positions than there are atoms within the known universe. Lirath Q. Pynnor
While Go may have more possible positions, that is really only because the Go board is much larger. Go only has one type of playing piece, and it is incapable of moving. Lirath Q. Pynnor
Moved from main page,
Claude Shannon, the father of modern information theory, calculated the total number of chess games, a number bigger than the number of atoms in the known universe, if you wished to play perfectly at each move. That number, 10120, is called the Shannon number in his honor.
It does make sense, Claude Shannon calculated that there are more possible chess games than there are atoms in the universe. If you can't find something in a search, try making it more general -- for instance, the term "Shannon number" may not be common but certainly you could find articles about Claude Shannon, chess, information theory, and Claude Shannon's calculation. Lirath Q. Pynnor
The freewheeling use of astonomical, combinatoric values, although informative and not mathematically errant, could leave the strong, deceptive impression upon the reader that chess is far too complicated for any human mind below genius level to play well. In fact, chess can be played well by numerous people with above average intelligence who are serious about learning the game precisely because much practical reductionism can be implemented without introducing hazards.
For example:
In the opening, a player can make one's first 6 moves (to arbitrarily choose a number) in any order one sees fit as long as the responses are tactically appropriate to the moves made by the opponent along the way to that point in the game. This means it is unnecessary to rotely memorize 6! (720) methods to achieve a certain, desired opening (thru 6 moves) in response to the opponent's chosen opening.
Conceive of playing openings in chess as being somewhat analogous to solving a jigsaw puzzle. There are a vast number of ways to solve the puzzle but all that matters is creating the complete picture which can only exist in ONE way.
Likewise, the opening book is memorized as "pattern matching". If white has completed his/her first six moves to achieve a certain pattern of pieces occupying squares, then black should respond by executing his/her sixth move via one defined, legal way to remain as strongly positioned as possible.
OmegaMan
The idea of pieces having points values does not seem to be present in Wikipedia in any complete form. Something similar to http://chess.about.com/library/ble23pvl.htm ? I have always been under the impression that some official scoring system existed which valued pieces to decide victory in incomplete games and similar. Is this incorrect? Chris Wood 11:45, 14 Apr 2004 (UTC)
I see that the empty link for the Thai national variant of chess has been changed from an empty link to Makruk into an active link to an existing article on Mak-yek. Something is wrong here. If we compare the rules of Makruk as given here http://www.ishipress.com/makrook.htm it seems clear that either one of the articles is wrong, or they aren't the same game. My hunch is that Mak-yek is too far removed from chess to be considered a lineal descendant like Makruk and Shogi and Xiangqi, just like Go-moku is not really a variant of Go, but I don't know enough to be sure. Can anyone help? Thanks, --Fritzlein 23:35, 25 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Dear all... I think that chess is more than ripe for having a wiki all of its own, a la the one that there is for They Might Be Giants. The sheer scope of stuff which there is on chess - players, openings, individual games with analysis, tournaments... I drool at how wonderfully detailed it could be, going into the sort of specifics which perhaps don't *quite* fit in on wikipedia.org. Anyone else up for it? What would be the first step? - Mack 12/05/04
The article mentions without references that there can be as many as 218 possible moves. Any comments on this ?
/Martin
The number of legal positions in chess is very large and computers didn't solve chess so I think that 218 is not the maximum number of possible moves in chess from a position.
Luming
Typically an average position has thirty to forty possible moves, but there may be as few as zero (in the case of checkmate or stalemate) or as many as 218.
At any one point in time, there are a maximum of 218 single moves from that position. If you look 10 moves ahead there are way more (assume 40 moves per position, that would mean 40^20 (~10^32) choices for the next 10 moves) but at each position, there is (apparently, although I have no proof of the exact number) a maximum of 218 moves. Think about how much each piece could move if it were placed in one of the four centre squares (K=8, Q=27, R=14, B=13, N=8) or on the second row (P=2) which means (counting both sides) 2(8+27+2(14)+2(13)+2(8)+8(2)) = 242 is the maximum number of moves, if none of the pieces could be blocked. So 218 sounds about right (if you include both sides) but it's mathematically too much for one side alone (which is what is implied by the stalemate comment as both sides can't be in stalemate at once). Anyone know if 109 is the one-sided number (I'd guess not as symmetry doesn't have to be conserved)? Telso 02:59, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Several chess-related articles have external links to sites with many games on file and the "animation" feature that lets the reader see each move without setting up a board. For example, the list of external links at Bobby Fischer includes these two:
There was recently a bit of a ruckus when the owner of the "Unofficial Bobby Fischer Chess Page" added links to his site, which, despite its name, offers animated games by several other players as well as Fischer. (See, for example, the collection of Morphy's games.) You can see some of the resulting discussion at Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress#192.85.50.2, was 69.133.93.199 and at Talk:The Game of the Century.
The broader issue raised is whether and under what circumstances we should link to any or all of these sites. I'm no longer active as a player, so I'm not familiar with any of them, but it appears that all three offer animated games without charge, although chessgames.com has a paid "premium" option. I can't play the games at muljadi.org but that may be some problem unique to my computer. Should all these links go (except for the occasional special circumstance)? If they're to stay, should we include all the sites? give preference to muljadi just because those links were added earlier? randomize among them? My inclination is to include all of them, but I can understand the objection of people like Hadal who commented, in the "Vandalism" discussion, that "Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not merely a collection of external links...." JamesMLane 13:59, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Hello gang, it's me - the lowly Chuck. Many good points offered here and I am amazed at the dedication among the moderators - if only I had read these discussions before posting my links. I'm certainly not going to promote my links anymore but as we all know, the links at muljadi.org clearly don't work so it may be doing a service to the readers of Wikipedia if someone can remove them instead of sending users to a place they can't use. By the way - that Mozilla issue on my website was my oversight - I don't have that browser so I never tried it; I'm going to get on it. From these discussion I'm thinking it's still not a good idea to add my links. I'll keep an eye on more opinions as they come - see ya.
Having some link or links to game repositories doesn't seem out of place to me. Two or three different sites may very well be able to co-exist peacefully, but ten or so on one page would probably be too much. What bothered me was the other issues brought up around this particular link like overwriting other links, no communication, the description being too much like advertising rather than just a useful title or description. --1pezguy 04:23, Jul 31, 2004 (UTC)
Yes, overwriting the links was my goof. I did try going over to muljadi.org to at least see if the admin could be contacted to fix the web sites because none of the games work - but I didn't see any contact email. As for my own links - I figure I will just move player biographies over to my own site, that way I can be as over zealous as I want - Chess Greats. But I do intend to give Wiki credit and a link back for any information I borrow (I am already linking back to Wiki in four different areas). -- Chuck
I find it disturbing that the first four headings of the Chess article are very well done and all that but then the Subject overview is a horrible, badly categorized mess of links. For example, there are the subjects History of chess, Chess literature, Chess in literature and arts and Chess in music. The history chapter lists literature links and the music chapter is needless because music counts as art. Chess and mathematics is also very closely related to Chess problems and puzzles, especially to Knight's Tour and Eight queens puzzle. There are also topics which have no text, they could be changed to normal links under See also. The list is in my opinion so horribly wrong that I don't know where to begin. I'm tempted to delete the Subject overview altogether but I'd like to hear your opinions first. ;) ZeroOne 12:47, 4 Aug 2004 (UTC)
A link in article was recently add:
Any idea how could this be integrated into Wikipedia? --andrejj 17:01, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)
A translucent chess set arranged for visual effect is "nice" visually but in my opinion totally out of place in a serious chess article.
It's more or less equivalent to placing some imaginary impossible combinations of math symbols in 'Mathematics' article.
I won't edit anything because maybe others won't share this attitude.
This article now has some sections duplicated twice. --BadSanta
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